‘You – you ripped it!’ Fibber gasped, his eyes wide with shock.
Fox’s heart thumped. ‘It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t snatched it from me in the first place!’
She looked at the two pieces of parchment. They no longer glistened silver or bore the word Shadowfall or tugged in any sort of direction whatsoever. They were just blank pieces of parchment. Whatever enchantment had fizzed away inside the map before was now gone.
Heckle hung her head.
‘That was our only way to find the Forever Fern!’ Fox cried.
She glanced at Fibber’s briefcase. Despite what he had said about the quest being about the ‘bigger picture’, and not the family fortune, here he was all smug in the knowledge that he had something of value inside that briefcase should they fail to find the Forever Fern. As always, Fibber had come out on top.
Tears rose up inside Fox and then she remembered the contents of her satchel. Fibber wasn’t the only one with a backup plan after all… She reached a hand inside and felt for the phoenix tear. Would the little marble tingle or flicker when she brought it out into the open, as it had done back in the Faraway? It was the only option she had left now. Then her fingers brushed against the snoozenut… And so furious was she with Fibber for tearing the flickertug map and ruining its magic that she didn’t think twice about the consequences of what she was about to do. She didn’t stop to think that if her brother fell into an enchanted sleep she’d be alone in the Bonelands. She didn’t stop to think that he might be telling the truth about them needing to save the world and work together. She didn’t stop to think that maybe she was making a colossal mistake. Fox was angry and she simply wanted to eliminate her competitor once and for all.
She waited for Fibber to look away, lifted out the snoozenut, then began tugging the dusknuts from the shrub next to her. She thrust a handful at her brother, with the snoozenut tucked in amongst them. The nuts were almost identical so there was no way of telling the dangerous one hidden in their midst.
‘If we don’t eat,’ she snapped, ‘we’re as good as dead anyway.’
‘Fine,’ Fibber grunted. ‘But then we need to make a plan – fast – because it won’t be long before Morg’s Midnights find us.’
Fibber ate the handful of nuts begrudgingly and Fox watched, her heart quickening. Would the magic of the snoozenut work immediately? Would her brother simply slump over and start snoring, then wake a month later, by which time – hopefully – she would have found the Forever Fern and made it home to claim victory?
Fox held her breath as Fibber yawned, shook himself and then yawned again.
‘It’s the strangest thing,’ he said, blinking to keep his eyes open. ‘I just can’t seem to –’ he yawned again – ‘stay awa—’
Before he could finish his sentence, a strange blue glitter spilled out of his mouth and danced round him.
Heckle began clucking. ‘Heckle is suddenly feeling very worried!’
‘What’s – what’s happening?’ Fibber cried, clawing at his mouth.
The glitter thickened and swirled round Fibber. Fox’s pulse drummed. Her brother, who had been so solid and real before, suddenly looked wispy and faint behind the blur of blue, and his voice was nothing more than a muffled cry. And then, in a moment of terrible clarity, Fox remembered that in the tree house she had only read half of the fablespoon’s explanation about the snoozenut. In most cases, sends consumer into an enchanted sleep for one month, it had said. But there had been more words after that: In rare cases… Only she had stopped reading because Fibber had interrupted her. Fox felt her chest tighten as the blue glitter spun round her brother, holding him prisoner in its whirl of magic. Fox bit her lip. What had she done?
There was a sudden POOF, like a clump of soot tumbling down a chimney and landing in a fireplace, which flung the buckles of Fibber’s briefcase open and sent the flurry of papers inside dancing about the tunnel. Then the swirl of blue seemed to unravel and Fox watched, in horror, as the shape of her brother changed. He grew smaller, much smaller, and decidedly more hairy, until he wasn’t a boy at all.
He was a little, brown, shaggy-haired sloth.
And had this sloth not been looking at her with Fibber’s big dark eyes, now ringed with black and surrounded by fur, Fox would have insisted that the snoozenut had done away with her brother altogether.
Heckle blinked. The sloth blinked. And Fox raised two hands to her mouth.
The sloth surveyed his tubby belly before turning his clawed paws over as if he, like Fox and Heckle, could scarcely believe what had just happened. Then he looked at the contents of the briefcase scattered about the tunnel. And, when Fox glanced at these papers, her eyes widened in surprise. The pages weren’t filled with numbers and graphs and complicated spreadsheets correlating with some magnificent business plan, as she had expected. They were filled with paintings. And these paintings weren’t just good. They were incredible.
There were watercolours of places: the view over the River Isar from Fibber’s bedroom back in Bickery Towers; the avenue of trees lining the driveway to their school; the interior of the penthouse suite at the Neverwrinkle Hotel. There were oil paintings of fruit bowls, furniture and sunsets. And there were charcoal sketches of people: an elderly couple walking a dog in the park; the man who ran the bakery near their home kneading bread; and – Fox gulped – there was one of her and Fibber together. They were walking over Wittelsbacher Bridge
